The American Physical Society was founded on May 20, 1899, when 36 physicists gathered at Columbia University for that purpose. . In 1913, the APS took over the operation of the Physical Review, which had been founded in 1893 at Cornell, and journal publication became its second major activity. Physical Review was followed by Reviews of Modern Physics in 1929, and by Physical Review Letters in 1958. Over the years, Physical Review has subdivided into five separate sections as the fields of physics have proliferated and the number of submissions grew.

Through the consortium access of 8 Full text journals is available from 1997 onwards. Also the PROLA (Physical Review Online Archive) search engine (which indexes all APS journal material published from 1893 to present) is now freely available to all users.